Work in Central Arkansas with a wide range of partners has improved health and wellness since 2013; will continue through sustained Foundation efforts

Little Rock, AR – After launching its Community Health Transformation effort in 2013, today the Clinton Foundation released a report detailing the impact and improvements made in five years to improve the health and wellness of the Central Arkansas community. The Foundation, through the Clinton Health Matters Initiative (CHMI), works in targeted regions to bring together diverse groups of stakeholders around a strategic blueprint to improve health outcomes, and then works to turn that plan into action. Central Arkansas was the second region to adopt CHMI’s Community Health Transformation model, which has also been implemented and completed in Coachella Valley, California and Greater Houston.

“The Clinton Foundation works to bring people together from across sectors to solve America’s urgent health challenges and reduce disparities,” said President Clinton. “By using our Community Health Transformation model, we’ve been able to address varying challenges specific to each community. In Arkansas, projects include implementing mobile fresh markets to increase access to nutritious food and working with partners to invest in education and youth development programs to improve health outcomes for people across the region.”

An independent team of researchers from Wake Forest School of Medicine conducted the evaluation for the Central Arkansas region finding that CHMI has contributed to the development of several notable health-improvement projects including:

Providing healthy and affordable food options to all residents in the region by continuing to implement a mobile fresh market that increases access to locally grown foods and local market opportunities for farmers;

Investing in summer youth engagement and development programs that reinforced the importance of education and taught health and life skills to increase access to quality education and living wage employment;

Working to lower the rate of teen pregnancies by increasing access to comprehensive health and sex education for at-risk Arkansans and by establishing an active youth leadership council to support peer leadership and help young adults make informed decisions about their sexual health; and

Helping to bridge the technology divide by coordinating the implementation of a pilot program that provided low-income residents with digital literacy training and access to computers and low-cost internet service to increase access to job opportunities and college enrollment.

The five-year report also details how the Foundation will be engaged in the Central Arkansas region in the years to come by continuing to work with the network of stakeholders in the region to developing solutions that address the health needs and can be brought to scale.

CHMI’s Community Health Transformation model fills a key role in communities with a wide range of organizations who are all making a concerted effort to improve health and wellness. These entities include local governments; hospitals, doctors, and others in the provider community; local nonprofits and support groups; members of the local business community; and many others. Without one cohesive strategy, many of their efforts to promote health and wellness do not complement each other as effectively as possible, and therefore are not as impactful.

CHMI works in communities across the United States, helping unite community members around a blueprint for improving the health and wellness of residents, and then works to turn that plan into action. This means bringing together a wide range of interested groups and stakeholders in the community, charting out common goals and objectives for improving health, and ensuring coordination and resources to support programs that achieve these goals. This equates to more effective community action, and more impactful progress in improving the health of the community.

We take a careful and deliberate approach to building out the blueprint and identifying ways to improve health outcomes. In each of CHMI’s communities, we:

Take an intensive look at the community’s overall health and wellness, including an examination of community and population health indicators to determine areas of greatest need;

Convene key stakeholders from across sectors to hear more about what organizations and leaders have been doing and what their priorities are;

Work collaboratively with these stakeholders to chart a local Blueprint for Action, which includes key priority areas and specific recommendations;

Coordinate across sectors to help implement these solutions identified in the Blueprint for Action; and

Work with national, regional, and local experts and programs to leverage additional resources that will help advance priority actions in the local Blueprint for Action.

CHMI works with regions disproportionately impacted by chronic disease to improve health outcomes and close gaps in health disparities. The Coachella Valley was the first community where we began this work – other current focus communities for our model, called the Community Health Transformation model, include Adams County, Mississippi; Northeast Florida (Jacksonville); Knox County, Illinois; and San Diego County, California.

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About the Clinton FoundationBuilding on a lifetime of public service, President Clinton established the Clinton Foundation on the simple belief that everyone deserves a chance to succeed, everyone has a responsibility to act, and we all do better when we work together. For nearly two decades, that premise has energized the work of the Foundation in overcoming complex challenges and improving the lives of people across the United States and around the world.

As an operating foundation, we work on issues directly or with strategic partners from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors to create economic opportunity, improve public health, and inspire civic engagement and service. Our programs are designed to make a real difference today while serving as proven models for tomorrow. The goal of every effort is to use available resources to get better results faster – at the lowest possible cost.

We firmly believe that when diverse groups of people bring resources together in the spirit of true cooperation, transformative ideas will emerge to drive life-changing action.